'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Bernie McGill
|title=The Butterfly Cabinet
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=This novel has been based on fact. McGill moves back and forth with various characters' stories. A child has died in the family home and the mother, Harriet has been tried in a court of law and found guilty. The fact that she is a practical, no-nonsense woman who does not wear her heart on her sleeve does not go down well with the majority of the jury. She has also committed another crime, almost equally as grave, she has sullied the family name of her husband. He is a prominent and respected member of the local community. Nothing will be the same again for either of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755370686</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Brett
|summary=Evereyone's favourite, Bertie, is still struggling with his over-protective, over-zealous mother Irene. Poor Bertie. He still has yoga class, saxophone lessons, Italian lessons, and he longs to go away to Scout camp, but really doesn't want his mum to come along as a helper. And, as the title suggests, he is looking forward to being seven. His little brother, Ulysses, is getting bigger and has developed an interesting reaction to their mother, whilst Irene herself goes missing in a rather mysterious manner...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971454</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Shannon Burke
|title=Black Flies
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Ollie Cross has failed to get into medical school. While he thinks about what he plans to do, he takes a job as a paramedic on the tough streets of Harlem, New York City, and finds his whole perspective on life and death beginning to shift.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535491</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louise Dean
|title=The Old Romantic
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ken is nearly eighty and he's obsessed with his death and planning his own funeral. He's even helping out on a volunteer basis in the local undertaker's, but what he'd really like is to be back with his family. The trouble is that they've rather moved on. His sister – who seems to have been the perfect woman in his life – is dead. He and his first wife are divorced and he's contemplating the same end to his second marriage. His elder son left home some twenty years ago as Gary and re-invented himself as Nick. At forty he's a solicitor, living with his girlfriend and her twelve-year old daughter and he's happy. He really doesn't want Ken to spoil things, but there are some things which you just cannot avoid. Ken is one of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490194</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sophie McKenzie
|title=The Medusa Project: The Rescue
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=It's a fascinating premise: four babies are implanted with a gene relating to psychic abilities, and as they grow up it becomes clear they have each reacted differently, and developed different skills. Then write four books (plus a short story for World Book Day) about their shared adventures, with each book focussing on one boy or girl in particular. In this book, Ed is the central character: he is able to read minds, but is forced to use his gift for evil in order to save his friends. A high-octane tale about four teens struggling to stay alive when it seems every adult on the planet is out to use them for their own ends.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847385273</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Natasha McElhone
|title=After You: Letters of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=What would you do if, without warning, your brilliant, loving, superman partner died from a catastrophic heart event at the untimely age of 43, leaving you with two young boys and a third on the way? Most of us would probably reach for the Valium and book a very long course of counseling. But Natascha McElhone couldn't because she was already stretched, juggling a busy transatlantic career as an actress as well as caring for her sparky young family. Coping as a single parent left no spare time for self-indulgence; within months she had a new baby as well. So she found her own way, grabbing instead at odd moments to write in her well-established diary. These short entries … e-mails, almost … to her dead husband form the basis of 'After You'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670919098</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Terry Dehart
|title=The Unit
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=We all know about the nuclear family, well now meet the post-nuclear family in Terry De Hart's brutal vision of a post apocalyptic America.
We know the score; terrorists attack key US cities with nuclear devices, US retaliates on the nations supporting the terrorist. There is only one possible outcome, mass casualties and the breakdown of civil society leading to the rise of barbarism in a devastated landscape in the grip of a nuclear winter. Within this madness a family survives not knowing how much of the country or the world has been destroyed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841499331</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Szalay
|title=The Innocent
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a slim volume but it is tense, taut and has bite. The story see-saws between the 1970s and the late 1940s where much political activity occurs, (there's an understatement) but especially in Russia as far as this novel is concerned. And as we dip into the even earlier period of the 1930s, we get a glimpse of the main character, Aleksandr, as a young man brimming over with political ideology. Along with his fellow students he fervently believed that 'The making of Communism was something sacred to us.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099515881</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephanie Burgis
|title=A Most Improper Magick
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The very first sentence of this charming and funny book sets the tone. Twelve-year-old Kat is setting off, dressed as a boy, to earn her fortune, pay back her brother's gambling debts, and save her two sisters from having to marry rich old men. Fortunately for Kat, she is stopped before she gets to the end of the front garden. All the trappings of Regency romance are here: fainting heroines, evil stepmothers, handsome young men with no prospects, and even a highwayman. But in this, the first book of a trilogy, there is something extra: Kat's late mother was a witch.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848770073</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Kay
|title=Micka
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Micka and Laurie are two ten year old boys. They're in the same class at school and are friends, of a sort. They both have vivid imaginations, and Laurie's plans involve finding a magical bone and using it for murder. Micka lives with his mum (who can't read and is often drunk) and his two older brothers who get into fights, are involved in crime, and who abuse Micka physically and sexually. Laurie lives with his parents, until they suddenly break up, and he is left with his mum who seems to be having a breakdown. The book is told from the point of view of the two boys, and so as we see how their own lives are falling apart, sympathising with them, we also read with horror their own descent into violence.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330513826</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margaret Muir
|title=Floating Gold
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=The novel opens with a description of the rotting remains of a human being battered by the waves on the beaches of the Isle of Wight. I cannot recall any book I have ever read starting on a more depressing note, but this is far from a depressing, or disappointing, story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070909051X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Veronyca Bates
|title=Dead in the Water
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=The novel opens with a couple of fishermen enjoying their hobby ... until they fish out of the water a dead body. The body of a middle-aged woman. Enter a couple of rather endearing, local policemen intent on getting to the bottom of it all. The plot develops nicely. We discover that the dead woman had two names, two identities. Why? It seems to make the job of the police twice as difficult. And Bates' conversational and over-the-garden-fence style is engaging and very easy to read. I romped through the chapters, no problem. The dead woman is becoming more of a mystery as time goes on. Her past is delved into and looked over with a fine tooth comb and the bobby-dazzler question 'What makes a girl of nineteen marry a man of sixty?' is soon asked. A good section of the book is spent trying to answer that question. The obvious answer would appear to be - money. But is it in this case? And all sorts of puzzling questions are thrown up left, right and centre.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709090773</amazonuk>
}}